ABSTRACT
The cut flowers are emblematic of the frailty and brevity of all things. In their rarity, susceptibility to wounding, and inevitable wilting, flowers—like humans who vanish like dew from the morning grass—elicit gentleness—or they elicit the opposite of gentleness: violence. In one of his late French poems, Rainer Maria Rilke ponders the relationship between gentleness and violence. Our fear is that gentleness would make us defenseless and afraid. But gentleness, Rilke argues, also appeases our fear. While the naivete of such faith is visible in the brevity and directness of the poem, what is remarkable nonetheless is that gentleness has, almost imperceptibly, become part of an economy, a pragmatic rather than an ethical or aesthetic value, enmeshed in a network of conditions and resolutions enforced by prepositions such as what, if, to, thus, so that. What would gentleness thus forced and constrained?
